SUBJECT MATTER-BASED RESULTS

The sales process is a series of activities that must occur in sequence – first, you need to understand your customer and create products or services that resonate. Next, it’s about interacting with those clients and creating a relationship and make a sale. Then, it’s all about service and delivering on your promises. And all along you need to be building trust as the foundation for a successful long-term relationship.

At Highland, our Sales and Marketing Effectiveness philosophy looks at all these areas to understand where change can be made to achieve better results. In working with our clients, typical issues include:

• Selling to the “non-buyer”
• Insufficient qualification process
• Absence of a defined sales process
• Failing to use a sales management process to communication expectations and manage results
• Communicating price and product details before establishing value
• Lack of documented sales plan
• Failing to leverage existing relationships into future sales
• Believing that sophisticated tools are the solution to a poor process
• Limiting skills by not investing in and reinforcing training
• Failing to document a sales process to facilitate transition

Experience

Our goal is to work with you to adapt “best practices” to your culture and current situation and help you implement measurable and sustainable change in your business. We help you understand how best practices are used in your company today, and analyze where improvements will yield the most return – leading to achievement of your goals:

• Sales Strategy: Do you have a clear definition of vision based upon best knowledge of present and future customer requirements? Are these reflected in field actions?
• Customer Segmentation: Are appropriate resources aligned against highest priority customers and reallocated to reflect strategy? Are activities monitored to optimize results?
• Market Strategy: Are various market segments fully operational? How adept is the company at responding to varying customer requirements? Is there a unified and team focused cooperation throughout and across channels?
• Customer Management Platform: Do you have integrated customer management Key Performance Indicators fully operational? Are all support functions operating on the same indicators to focus on bringing highest value to customers?
• Account Plans and Sales Goals: Are customer requirements and information driving the planning, goal setting process? What real-time information on trends and account behavior is communicated? What actions are taken rapidly to respond to problems and opportunities?
• Reward and Recognition (Incentives): Are incentives and rewards are linked to strategic objectives? Do you monitor performance and provide continuous feedback? Is there a process is in place to monitor & realign with changing customer requirements?
• Customer Information Profiles: Are you utilizing customer information as a strategic differentiation to identify trends and breakthrough strategies to maintain market leadership positions?
• Sales Training and Coaching: Do you view knowledge and skill bank as a strategic asset used as a competitive advantage?
• Account Penetration: How are functional business teams aligned with counterparts in an account at all key levels? Are you working in close cooperation to finding ways to add value to your client’s business?
• Sales Forecasting: Are you utilizing real-time customer requirements drive the forecasting process?
• Opportunity Tracking: Is there an assessment of each opportunity based upon account potential and relationships to provide an end-to-end accurate picture of the pipeline? How proactive is the sales team in following up and reporting results so management has real time information with which to look at future trends?
• Sales Automation Systems: Is your system linked to customers and internal functions? Not only as sales tool, but customers input orders, inventories and other critical information that is used by all management levels to become closer to the customer?

Results

Client results will always vary, but some of our recent achievements include:

• Record top line performance for three consecutive months
• 20% improvement in Sales Performance rating
• Increase of $10-12 million in projected first year top line revenue, without adding any additional selling costs
• Increased sales 11% over plan